DMJournal: About

DMJournal–Architecture and Representation is a new publication dedicated to the exploration of practices, histories and material cultures of drawing in architecture and related fields. Initiated by Drawing Matter in collaboration with the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA), it builds upon the kind of wide-ranging inquiry into architecture’s graphic forms evident in the rich array of texts that has accumulated over recent years on the Drawing Matter website.  This is a resource that now attracts some 15,000 readers each month, from a broad range of disciplines. DMJournal will extend this content by providing a complementary publishing platform that is peer-reviewed and able to host full-length articles. It will promote scholarship that is rigorous, engaging and supple, and that approaches drawing as an expansive and vital area of cultural production.

We aim to publish writing that enriches our understanding of drawing and drawings, offering nuanced and meaningful ways of thinking about them. We are as concerned with drawing as an idea and an action as with drawings as things, and welcome contributions that respond to DMJournal’s range of interests – these include: the ways that drawing and its related terms have been conceptualised; specific practices or artefacts of drawing, including those seen from a cross-cultural perspective; drawing’s historical transformations, material conditions of production, modes of circulation and exchange, and relation to cultures of collecting and exhibition; and – significantly –  its enduring role as a site of speculation and invention. For the journal, ‘drawing’ signifies an area of inquiry rather than a pre-defined thing – one that is as equally likely to engage photography, film, collage, model, installation or event, as it is pen upon paper, and to be concerned with sequences as often as individual images.

While centred on architecture and with a cultural-historical orientation, DMJournal promotes cross-disciplinary reflections on drawing, and welcomes contributions from those in related fields whose work responds to the interests of the journal. Importantly, the journal provides opportunities for practitioners to examine, with rigour, both their own design processes and that of others.

Calls for papers will be issued in relation to themes developed in dialogue with members of our Advisory Committee. Submissions will be peer-reviewed as they are received, and papers individually uploaded to the DMJournal section of the Drawing Matter website once they have passed through the editorial process. Each journal issue will be accessible online as it is assembled and will remain so on its completion. On the conclusion of each issue a limited print run will be made, with complimentary copies available to contributors and for purchase.

Contact: journal@drawingmatter.org